


A Summer in Maine

by lyrithim



Series: Northbound [2]
Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: 2017 OMGCP Heartbreak Fest, Angst, Eventual Happy Ending, Future Fic, M/M, Not necessary to read part one, Pining, Reunions, but I'd love for you to :), essentially an angsty 30k lobsterboat romance taking place in small town maine
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-08-25
Updated: 2018-07-01
Packaged: 2018-12-11 10:31:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 14,270
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11712582
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lyrithim/pseuds/lyrithim
Summary: Five years after Will dropped out of Samwell, Derek Nurse shows up by Will’s boat in Langford, Maine.(Written for OMGCP Heartbreak Fest 2017.)





	1. By the Harbor

**Author's Note:**

  * For [akadiene](https://archiveofourown.org/users/akadiene/gifts).



> This is a sequel to "[All But the West Wind](http://archiveofourown.org/works/11672976)," which is itself a submission for the 2017 OMGCP Heartbreak Fest. It's not necessary to have read that story to understand this one, though I'd love for you to! I'm keeping my identity anonymous as per the rules of Heartbreak Fest but will manually de-anonymize myself after Reveals on September 20th. In the meantime, hope you guys enjoy!!
> 
> Note that the beginning is slightly slow. I wanted to try out a certain writing style.

William J. Poindexter—or “Will,” more rarely “Bill,” “Quinton’s Boy” to his neighbors, “Billy” to his siblings, and “Dex” once upon a time—opens his eyes and lets consciousness rush through his skull. It is a quarter to four in the morning, and for a long moment he lies in his bed, stunned, as the chilly morning air stirs restlessly around him. Then he breathes.

He thumbs close the alarm on his phone and gets dressed. Out of his room, he follows the refrigerator’s dull hum to the kitchen and stops to press his ear against his uncle’s room. He peeks in. Uncle Quinton is a lump beneath the covers, and his snore is audible. Not eight months ago all Dex could hear was silence in these mornings, and he would spend cold minutes kneeling by the bedside until he could see the slight rise and fall of the old man’s chest. Within the span of half a year his uncle has fought back against a Stage IV recurrence of his lung cancer and is working steadily toward remission, the fighter everyone knows him to be. Now Will slips the door shut, sends God a silent thanks, and continues down the hall.

He finishes the remaining half of a ham-and-cheese sandwich and packs his lunch with the rest of his equipment. Capt. Ulysses Redden—Uncle Quinton’s aged bulldog, in all ways the canine embodiment of Uncle Quinton himself—wheezes sleepily toward Will as Will toes into his working shoes by the front door. Will scratches him behind the ears and waves him goodbye as the bulldog squats heavily by the doormat, watching him leave with wide round eyes.

Will bikes down Sixth Street, yawning aggressively into the air, and hopes the chill jolts his brain into wakefulness. Dawn is creeping up across the frigid Atlantic, but first it will have to wade through a thick layer of fog to reach the watery seaside town of Langford, Maine. Sometimes Will can hear the first rooster’s crows on his way to the docks. Most of the time, though, it is this crystal silence that envelopes the entire town, with the stars so plentiful overhead the sky looks raining with it. At the turn to Petersfield Pier, he parks his bike and jiggles his leg into a half-jog, hoping to warm the muscles up despite the scant sleep he had the night before.

Unlike the rest of the town, the docks are bloated with activity—though hushed, in respect for a Monday morning. Curses are huffed out under phlegmy coughs, and engines rumble to wakefulness, rudders biting into the whitening waters. All around, the lobstermen of Langford haul traps over the rail onto the decks of their boats. Around the largest ship, the _Dancing Queen_ , are a cluster of veteran lobstermen and their deck-hands, ready to set sail for days on sea.

Most of the other fishermen in Langford are old-timers, some of whom got their start on the sea as soon as they were shipped back from Vietnam. Will didn’t grow up in Langford, but these men knew him from his visits to Uncle Quinton’s. Five years ago, when he first tried lobstering on his own and could barely manage twenty traps in a day, they treated him like any other twenty-something kid from Langford who left town for the south and got his sorry ass kicked all the way back home—that was, they took him under their wing, and they taught him what Uncle Quinton wasn’t able to in three summers on a lobster boat. Will learned quickly. Within a year, he was able to band lobsters close to veteran speed and get pinched only once every other week.

There is a group of younger guys too, half of them sternmen apprenticing on someone else’s boat, half of them on their own after clobbering together a loan and a couple hundred bucks at the end of high school. He knows each of them by name—everyone knows everyone else and their mother by name, in Langford—and he nods as he passes them. But he lacks the camaraderie they have with each other, the same back-slapping and nicknaming that comes with young men in a crowd.

Will steps one foot into the _Yellow Irish Rose_ , lets the ship find its balance with his weight, and puts his other foot onto the platform. After spearing through the first round of baits and checking gas levels, he turns the keys. It takes a second, but the engine roars to life, and he breathes a sigh of relief.

He steps into a pair of heavy waders and snaps the straps over his shoulders. When Mr. Edgar Hardin and his thirty-year-old son boards the neighboring ship, he calls out a greeting, and they wave back easily. Then he steps on the gas and takes off in a rush of saltwater-sprinkled wind.

He sails for a few minutes, enjoying the monotone serenity of a morning at sea, before he flips on the VHF radio. It crackles with static before fine-tuning on the cheerful, garbled chatter of old Frank Gobson of Henrietta Road. By his own insistence Frank Gobson is the Langford lobstermen’s unofficial morning radio host, bringing to them the latest on sports, weather, technology, how the governor and the federal government are screwing over hardworking Mainers, town gossip, and that Masshole who cut him in traffic the other day. It is irresponsible and may actually get someone killed one day if a distress call doesn’t reach the Coast Guard in time, but Frank at seventy-five does not give a damn about radio frequency courtesy, and the others let it go because the man is just too entertaining—and yes, they do need to know newest developments in Adrian Page and Lily Walden’s elopement to Portland.

The sky is dyed with streaks of blue by the time Will reaches his first set of traps. The buoys on the side of Uncle Quinton’s family are colored orange, crimson, and shamrock-green, which form a nice set of contrasts in the daylight but are often washed gray pre-dawn. Will wasted a lot of time those first few years before his eyes adjusted. Now he steers his boat right next to the buoys, which he pulls in with a gaff hook onto the pot hauler. The pulley of the hauler whirs as the line is winded, until the glistening cage of wriggling lobsters is dragged to the boat’s flank.

He is slower today because of his fatigue—slower to determine whether each lobster meets state regulations in size, slower to find his tail clipper when he catches an unmarked egg-carrying female. This is his fault, really. He forgets how long it takes to sort out Uncle Quinton’s bills when they come—those assholes at Friedman Hospital have charged them extra more than once in five years. He’s begun to more fully understand the last couple rounds of treatment after Uncle Quinton got a friend of his from New Hampshire up to explain all the jargon jumbled up in the statements, but he still has to search up medical terms late into the night every month.

Once, later that morning, he is distracted enough that his foot almost gets caught in the trap line as a tangle of buoy and pots are released back into sea. He watches, panting from the impromptu pirouette he performed, as the buoys sink beneath the surface and then bob back up.

 

 

 

Among the many oddities of the Poindexter family is that they keep track of each other through emails rather than any other form of communication utilized by people in the twenty-first century. Their schedules are such that calling or video-chatting would never work. Will has also sworn off social media some years now, while James— To say that James is reluctant to cut time away from his own growing nuclear family is probably the mildest way to put it.

Will received a letter from both James and Sarah two days ago. James penned his in his usual short, disciplined sentences. Will’s sister-in-law is well. The toddler Timmy is walking, though _not_ well. Uncle Quinton’s sports fishing store in Portland—the one James now runs—is seeing an uptick in shopping activity. That is expected, since it’s tourist season. Thus ends the letter.

Will’s thoughts have mostly stayed on Sarah’s letter. There was an incident a couple of days ago: their mother lost her temper in the middle of a grocery store downtown and almost got into a physical fight with the chaplain’s wife. “But I stopped her,” is all Sarah has about the rest of the subject. It’s not much of a consolation, though, considering that Elly, their eight-year-old sister, had also been present.

There’s another page of the letter that talks about sending Elly here, with Will and Uncle Quinton, over the summer. And Will wants to take her, but try as he might, he can’t make the mental calculations to yield the hours he needs to take care of Elly right. A slight lightening of responsibilities will do his mother a lot of good, and it will give Sarah a small break from Elly’s recent sullenness. But Uncle Quinton still isn’t in any shape to take care of a child for hours at a time, and despite what the older residents of Langford might say, Will can’t bring her on a lobster boat.

 

 

 

By two Will has finished hauling most of his traps and switching in ones with fresh bait dangling from the roof of each cage. He sails back to shore, his arms aching from the work. By the looks of the squirming little bastards, he’s got a couple hundred pounds in the water tank, and his prediction is confirmed back at the wharf when Ava, Frank Gobson’s grand-niece and the co-op’s dealer of the day, shoots him his receipt. As he reads the number on the bottom line, the tension bundling together his shoulders cuts loose, one by one.

Yeah. This is a good start of the week.

Usually when he finishes before dinnertime, he heads back home to check up on his uncle, but now he walks back to the _Yellow Irish Rose_. He wants to take a look at the boat’s engine later today. It’s high tide, which means he can steer the boat to shallow shores and inspect the rudder and keel at the boat’s underbelly when the tide recedes—there was a terrifying moment last week where the engine wouldn’t start in the middle of his hauls. If he finds a problem early, he can fix it himself, but if the whole thing needs to be replaced it can cost him a quarter of his yearly wage—

And then—this is the strangest thing, and he doesn’t think he will forget this for the rest of his life—the air around him swells, and in the distance he can feel a restless shifting of tides, the sea a palpably live and hungry thing. A trio of seagulls behind him screech a three-note cry.

The sun marks high overhead now, its heat bleeding through Will’s shirt. The soggy harbor wavers. A lobsterman passing by—Will recognizes him, but he won’t be able to name him afterwards—speaks to Will, something about a man visiting from out of town. Will nods and continues his trek towards his boat. As he walks the waves crash against shore like shattered glass, beating louder, an upward drawn pitch, an unyielding crescendo.

Then Will sees him.

The man lounges against a wooden beam, right across the _Yellow Irish Rose_. Will stops in his steps, run through with the desire both to embrace the man and to fall at his feet.

“Hey,” Derek Nurse says. “It’s been a while.”

 

 

 

Derek wears glasses now. It fits him, the pair of square spectacles perched over the bridge of his nose, framing his eyes as he talks, jokes, wanders. His button-up is open at the collar, and he moves along the streets of Langford with an ease that finally is natural to him all these years later. His shorts are a brand Will vaguely recognizes from some magazine at the grocery store checkout counter, and when Derek walks, the pavement smarts from the flat clap of his flip-flops.

Will can’t remember what they talked about on the way to Claire’s Place across the street; he is too busy taking this Derek in. This man’s smile is the same half-teasing upward tilt of the lips, and this man’s one-eyebrow quirks convey such a familiar Nursey-like sardonicism it makes Will’s heart ache. But he is different too—quieter, the silence casted over his demeanor like a gray veil. Will doesn’t know if it is the result of being in Will’s presence, or if it is Derek’s natural becoming over the years. Will can’t tell.

“So,” Will says, managing a half-smile, as they settle into a booth, “what brings you to Middle-of-Nowhere, Maine?”

Derek’s gaze swings to Will from the photos and posters plastered over the diner walls. For a moment Will thinks he won’t answer the question, but then Derek smiles.

“I’ve got a publishing deal with a small press in New York—an indie company, it’s no big deal,” Derek says, pulling out a simple black leather-bound journal. “They read some of my poems, and the editor recommended that I do a series on New England. Said it’d be more thematically coherent that way.”

He flips to a graphite-smeared page cut through with wide, looping letters, though some of them are crossed-out or cramped into corners of the page. Will recognizes the handwriting, recognizes the scrawl that is Derek’s mind pressed into paper. He strings together a few words:

_On Leaving_

_Here is where the babe falls from the spring-woven cradle of this silent city and upon uprooting himself becomes a man—_

“That’s incredible,” Will says, grinning fully now as Derek shoves the notebook back into his pocket. “But why am I surprised, really? Derek Nurse, book author. Always fit you.”

Derek smiles and sips his coffee. “Thanks. That means a lot to me.”

Will’s heart sinks. He looks out the window, then back.

“So what?” Will asks. “You’ve hit up all the other states in New England already?”

“Pretty much,” says Derek. “I went to Yale for their Ph.D. program, you know—”

“I heard,” Will says, maybe a little too quickly. “English lit and African American Studies, right? Congrats, really. How is that?”

“I—I actually finished a year ago.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah, it was—fine, I guess. Anyway, my dad’s side of the family has a vacation home in Vermont, and we went back and forth between Vermont and New Hampshire a lot when I was a kid—I’ve got a couple of poems about that too, there’s some poetic significance with childhood and the emptiness of Vermont, whatever, yeah? So I’ve got that. And Massachusetts is—” He bites his lip. “Andover. Samwell. You know.”

Their server—Veronica, a few years younger than Will, daughter of a man Will helped fix up the roof for a couple years back—asks if they are ready to order. Derek pulls off that old charmer smile that seems to render Veronica quite a bit breathless. They order.

The memories of Will’s three years at Samwell are replaying in his mind, and throughout all of them is the unyielding litany of _Derek, Derek, Derek_. Then they stop, stuck on that last day of his junior year—

“You’ve got a place to stay?” Will asks, after Veronica takes both of their menus. “In this part of Maine?”

Derek’s lips part, and Will sees the tip of his tongue slide over his teeth in contemplation. Then he says, “No,” and, “I wasn’t thinking that—” and, “If you are—”

“Yes,” Will says firmly. “I am. I’m—well. I’m staying with my uncle—you know him. Uncle Quinton.”

“He won’t mind?”

“No. He has an extra bedroom. No one uses it except some of his friends from Portland when they come up here. It’ll give him an excuse to go around and fuss over the house. He loves guests.”

“Still. I know you didn’t plan for this, this is pretty sudden.” Derek uncrosses his legs. “Let me pay rent.”

“No,” Will says. He grins. “You’re writing about Maine, aren’t you? If you come on and help me out on the boat once in a while, I’ll call it even.”

He wonders if he went too far when Derek’s eyes appraise him once again. But then Derek grins too. “Fine. You’ve convinced me, then.” Derek crosses his arms and leans back. “Learning about the famous Maine lobster fishermen, from a great Maine lobster fisherman himself? Sounds chill. I’m down.”

Will can’t help it; he laughs and he laughs. A few of the other patrons of the diner turn and look at him, and Derek raises one amused eyebrow when he finally stops.

“What was _that_?” Derek asks.

“You,” Will says.

“Me?”

“ ‘Chill,’” Will repeats. He leans forward. “Fuck, I’ve missed that.”

The audacity of the confession shocks him. Shocked Derek too, judging by his silence, and they don’t speak again until the food arrives. It is steaming, and Derek takes off his glasses and shoots Will a smile before he eats. Without his glasses, the resemblance to his college-aged self is even more apparent, and Will tries not to stare.

So much time has passed that Will often forgets: The last time he saw Derek wasn’t five years ago—that final, furtive day Will spent in Samwell, the day Derek kissed him, the day Will ran away. It was a year later. Graduation, 2018.

He had accepted Chris’s invitation to see him walk the stage, and he returned to Samwell that May to throngs of students in heavy black robes. He visited the Haus too, saw Whiskey, Tango, and Ford—then, ready to be seniors. He greeted former classmates and acquaintances, some of them shocked to see him, some of them offering placid waves that slipped right past him, having not known he was gone at all. He sat with the Samwell Men’s Hockey alumni who were able to make it to the ceremony and smiled and thanked all of their well wishes for his uncle. When their teammates crossed the stage, he screamed and cheered with the rest of them.

He didn’t speak to Derek. He saw Derek after the ceremony, of course—he had learned that he was magnetized to Derek’s presence, even after a year of separation—but as much as he was drawn to Derek, Derek seemed just as repulsed: whenever Will moved to approach Derek, Derek had already slipped away to another gaggle of friends, family members, or professors. At one point their eyes met. Will opened his mouth to speak, and Derek turned to walk across the glade.

Will got the hint. He went for lunch with Chris’s family and a couple of Chris’s other friends. Then he said his last greetings, returned to his car, and drove back up to Maine. And that was that.

“How long,” Will asks Derek now, “will you be working on your book?”

Across from him, Derek chews and swallows. “Until the end of July.”

“I see,” Will says. “Then where will you go?”

Derek lays down his fork carefully before he answers. “West.”

“West?”

“I’m moving to California. I was offered a teaching position at Berkeley—tenure track. I accepted it last week.”

It isn’t anything Will did not expect. Still, all he can say is, “In two months then.”

“In two months,” Derek agrees.


	2. Town Tour

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Will gives Derek the no-holds-barred tour of Langford, all the sordid town secrets and gossips included.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So gUeSs WhO took a hiatus for almost as long as Ngozi. (Life is hard.)
> 
> Jokes aside life has calmed down enough that I will have time to write now. Chapter 3 is 90% complete, and I have a pretty clear outline for everything else. *confetti* I'm hoping that a weekly update schedule won't be too ambitious.

They split the bill, and Will leaves his bike by the pier to give Derek driving instructions to Uncle Quinton’s house. Will watches Derek’s hands the entire way, Derek’s control over the steering wheel smooth and strong over the chipped roads. Derek didn’t learn to drive until sophomore year, Will remembers, and he and Chowder teased him mercilessly about it when they stayed in New York that summer prior.

Before long Derek pulls up by a one-story house lined with white clapboards at the edge of the forest. By the front door, Uncle Quinton is in the process of stringing up a glass wind chime to the veranda, but he steps down heavily from the ladder when he sees the car. He walks over, Ulysses barking by his side.

Will steps out to the front lawn. His uncle stops.

“Bit slow today, aren’t you, kid?” Uncle Quinton grunts, tapping his walking stick to the ground. “Couldn’t remember where you left the pots? This is what you get for relying on them fancy gee-pee-esses.”

Will scratches the back of his neck. “Actually—”

The car’s engine cuts off, and the driver’s door pops open. Uncle Quinton’s thinned brows shoot up when Derek stands by Will’s side.

Derek reaches forward to grasp Uncle Quinton’s hand. The handshake is firm—very firm, it seems, judging by the protruding tendons on both sides. He smiles. “Hi. Derek Malik Nurse. Will and I were on the same team in Samwell.”

Will prays that the next words out of Uncle Quinton’s mouth are not “Samwell? That overinflated private college subsidized by taxpayer dollars for the children of rich folks and the promotion of socialist propaganda?” To his surprise, Uncle Quinton simply replies, “Quinton Franklin Haynes. I’m Billy’s uncle. Former small business owner, now—” Ulysses barks. Uncle Quinton pockets his other hand. “Well. In retirement. You?”

“I’m a nineteenth-century literary scholar. Just finished my dissertation,” Derek says. “Currently a postgrad.”

“Bowdoin? Colby?”

Derek squares his shoulders. “Yale.”

Uncle Quinton blows out a breath and turns away. Derek stares after him, utterly perplexed. Will stifles a laugh. Uncle Quinton’s main criteria for prestige is proximity, but he will explain this to Derek later.

“Come on,” Uncle Quinton calls back, already steps away from the front door. “Get inside. You can be boiling eggs out in this sun.”

 

 

Inside the house, Will picks a few of Ulysses’ toys off the ground and tosses a squeaky ball down the hall, and Ulysses trots after it methodically. Will offers Derek the most comfortable seat in the cramped living room: a purple lounge chair that looks as though it was beat repeatedly with a baseball bat. For the first time that day, Derek appears unsure. But when he catches Will looking he shoots Will a quick, even smile, and thanks him.

“Yeah,” Will says, “yeah, it’s not a big deal. Just get yourself settled and— Sorry, wait here for a bit. I’m gonna help my uncle out,” he says, then dashes to the kitchen, where—sure enough—Uncle Quinton is already trying to lug his huge steel kettle from the stovetop.

“Let me.” Will slips his fingers around the handle, and Uncle Quinton lets go reluctantly.

As Will pours hot water into two mugs, the other man says, “I’m not at death’s bed anymore, you know, Billy.”

Before Will can reply, Capt. Ulysses proudly reenters the kitchen, the ball between his teeth making huffy, whistling squeaks. Uncle Quinton kneels down and rubs the dog behind the ears.

“So Derek’s your college friend, huh?” he asks.

“Yeah. I think I might have—mentioned him, once or twice. He was my roommate, third year.”

“That wasn’t Chris?”

“No, that was Derek. Derek was my D-man partner too.”

Uncle Quinton squints at him. Will can feel his face reddening.

“He’s staying two months here,” Will cuts in. “Is that alright? I told him that’s alright.”

“ ’Course it is. This is your house as well as mine.” Uncle Quinton waves his hand dismissively. “Now go back out there. I don’t care if you guys were pals back in the day, this is no way to treat a guest. I’ll bring out the key lime you made later—can’t imagine a drive up here to be easy, for someone from _Connecticut_.”

Derek is scanning the headlines of the local press. It has only been a few minutes, but when Will sees him, he feels the shock of it roiling through his gut again.

“Find anything interesting?”

“The language is—fiery,” Derek allows.

“Uncle Quinton says the _Swafford Bay Weekly_ is the most dishonest paper in the state. It’s owned by some guy in Manhattan.”

“He’s probably right then,” Derek chuckles. “But your uncle still keeps a subscription?”

“One of his best friends from high school is the editor-in-chief. They have a pretty intense email chain going on.” Will looks to the kitchen. “I think he’s going to take a while. I can show you your room now, if you don’t mind.”

Derek folds the paper close. “Lead the way.”

Uncle Quinton’s guest room was once designated for his son, a son that his wife never managed to carry to full term. But any sentimental attachment the room retained must have been washed thin by brief and happy inhabitations from friends, families, and reluctant acquaintances over the years—most of whom live deeper down the coast, and many out of Maine altogether. With Sarah, Will himself had stayed in the room many days in those summers before college, though when he moved to Langford five years ago, he cleaned out the third, smaller room across the hall that Uncle Quinton had used as a storage space.

After resting his satchel by the spindly chair, Derek sweeps past the graying floral wallpapers and smooths a hand across the covers. By the window, he slips two fingers between the dusty blinds and peeks through the water-stained window pane, to what Will knows to be a view of the messy woods as well as a backyard of moldy logs and clumps of dead branches Will has yet to haul out. Then Derek taps his fingers across the room’s square desk, whose wood-pattern sticker is fraying at the corners.

“We haven’t cleaned this place in a couple of weeks,” Will apologizes, leaning against the door. “Might be a bit dusty.”

Derek blinks and withdraws his hand. “No—no, I was just— New places are interesting to me. As a writer.”

Will lets his eyes focus on where Derek’s attentions—and touches—were, and he sees the ancient, hand-stitched patterns over the blankets; the dulling carvings at the headboard; the security in this small space.

“I see that,” Will says.

Derek’s eyes are on him again. Then he looks away as he takes off his glasses, resting them on the desk.

“You guys’ve got a nice place here,” Derek says. “The town too. The people I’ve talked to all were pretty friendly when I asked for directions—not a lot of weird looks.”

“Yeah—they’re great, most of them,” Will agrees, now examining the doorframe. “And we’ve been lucky. The jobs, everything—life could’ve taken us in worse directions.”

“Yeah,” Derek echoes.

Silence intervenes again. Then finally Will sighs and faces Derek.

“Look, I think I sort of sprang the question of staying here on you earlier, and made assumptions,” Will says. “You said you wanted to research Maine, but this—this isn’t the prettier part of Maine. I just wanted to let you know—if you felt obligated to stay—”

“Nah, Poindexter,” Derek says, grinning up at him. “That’s what you were worried about? It’s fine. Don’t worry. As if you could ever have made me do anything I didn’t want to.”

“Alright,” Will says, feeling himself relaxing. “Alright.”

Uncle Quinton calls for Will from the living room, Ulysses echoing with a bark.

“Looks like the pie and tea are ready,” Will tells Derek. “Maybe there are cookies too—he was taking way too long just to whip up the cream.”

“Sweet.” As Derek stands, he holds up a hand. “Wait, you said pie?”

“You don’t think I forgot everything Bitty taught me, did you?”

 

 

For two days Will is unable to show Derek around town. After that afternoon, when Derek carried his single gym bag of clothes and toiletries into Uncle Quinton’s house, the weather turned against the azure blue that marked Monday’s sky. Langford and its surrounding seacoast are besieged by sparse summer storms that slow Will’s lobster-fishing routine by a good couple of hours each day. But Derek, as far as he knows, explores the town just fine on his own in the daytime, judging by how quickly some of the lobstermen pull Will aside after hauls to ask about “that young man from out of town.”

The stuttered awkwardness between him and Derek shows no signs of rolling even. When they see each other at mealtimes, Derek asks after his day, smiles, and makes small talk. Will stumbles through their conversations, and though Derek _must_ know—he never reacts. But this, Will comforts himself, is at least a constant he can hang onto: his utter lack of defense when it comes to Derek Nurse.

By Wednesday noon the storm clouds have evaporated for good, and he returns to Uncle Quinton’s home at two. Derek’s Volvo still sits by the garage door. But once Will is in, Uncle Quinton tells him that Derek is out.

“He left an hour ago,” says Uncle Quinton. Donned with work goggles, he is examining a bundle of thin wires. “I believe Mrs. Gobson invited him to share _a cup of tea_ with her.” He mimes Mrs. Gobson’s way of holding a teacup—with one extremely arched pinky.

“I’ll go rescue him,” Will promises.

Will finds Derek two blocks away with a harrowing look in his eyes, holding a platter of cookies—lemon thyme, Will guesses, Mrs. Gobson’s specialty. When he jogs up to Derek, he asks, “Did she ask you to take her daughter’s hand in marriage?”

Immediately Derek says, “I didn’t think people like her existed in this century anymore.” He is staring down at the platter. “Fuck, that was—Austenian.”

“She’s very involved in her daughter’s love life. Ava’s had—a lot of complaints. Mrs. Gobson’s on the town council too, you know.”

“For real?”

“Yeah. Good with finances.” Will grins at Derek’s expression. “I’m serious.”

“Oh, no,” Derek assures him. “I definitely see that.”

And that sets Will off on another round of laughter.

In the time they spend walking back to the house, Uncle Quinton has rolled out his set of pliers, caliper, and awl, and is in the middle of hammering down the edges of a pair of long, thin wires when Derek and Will return. With each stroke against the worn block, the pair of glass beads laying on the side tremor away from the center.

Uncle Quinton greets them as they enter and doesn’t say a single word when he receives the cookies from Will. Only a faint quiver in his mustache gives him away. The hammer is set down. Uncle Quinton kneels by the coffee table and begins to arrange the cookies on the recently wiped dessert stand. “Heading out?”

“I’ll be borrowing your nephew for the evening,” Derek tells him. “He promised me a no-holds-barred tour of Langford—all the sordid town secrets and gossips included.”

“ ‘No holds barred,’ huh?” Airily, Uncle Quinton says, “Then you better ask him about the time he tipped himself right overboard in high school.”

“We won’t be back for supper,” Will says quickly, changing the subject. “Is yesterday’s chicken pot pie fine?”

Uncle Quinton grunts as he arranges the second tier of cookies. “It’s more than fine.”

“I’ll leave it on the table with some microwaving instructions,” Will promises.

When Will finishes doing just that and returns to the living room, Uncle Quinton is back at his propped-up work station at the corner of the living room, threading the piece of copper wire through one of the glass beads with a tweezer. Derek leans against an armrest and watches—with all the concentration he had when they were on ice together in Faber, listening to Bitty run through their new play. It is too easy to imagine how similar Derek must have been in grad school. How he must have brought the same quiet diligence he had with hockey to yellowed pages, musty with dust, under the high, vaulted ceilings of the library of another university.

But Derek is here now, and when he looks up he smiles at Will and inquires, “Ready to go?” And Will replies that he is.

 

 

Once in the open air again, Will asks where Derek would like to visit first, and Derek answers, with his head tossed back, “Show me the places you love,” as brightly and openly as Will has ever seen him. It catches Will off-guard, like one of those damn exam questions back in Samwell, hooking him suddenly and precisely where he is weakest.

So Will says, “There are a couple of good places around here, if you want the best small-town experience,” and when Derek looks back across him, continues, “You’ve already been to Claire’s—I’ll show you the best ice cream place in the entire county.”

In less than ten minutes they park at a tin-roofed shop with the proud, but faded, sign proclaiming its title: Icy Spectacular. There is no other customer in the store. The pimply boy standing by the cash register shoots them sullen looks, takes off his headphones, and drags his feet along the dirty tiled floor before he stands by five tubs of ice cream on display. At Will’s urging, Derek orders the Maine Blueberry Supreme while Will gets himself the strawberry. When Derek remarks, wide-eyed, upon the wonderful burst of flavor, Will wonders if he finds the shop suitably esoteric enough for his poetry.

They walk around the three-store plaza as they eat before heading for the coast, where Will takes Derek along for a quick tour of the local fisherman’s co-op. Derek takes a particular interest in the scales by the entrance, as well as the men in heavy waders bundling alewives into bait. The bigger boats were just pulling in for the day, and some of the older lobsterman nod to Will as they pass. A few of the young guys greet Derek by the name of “Shakespeare” or “poet guy” and barter with him their catch. “Can’t buy them as fresh anywhere else,” Henry, one of the thirty-year-olds, says with a wink. Once or twice Derek is invited to drinks at Sampson’s, and Derek responds in kind in enthusiasm, but without commitment. Will watches Derek’s eyes when he laughs.

When they leave, the smell of fish still singed in Will’s hair, he takes Derek to Langford School—the entire K-12 population of the town, lassoed into ten acres of space. The school is attached to the town library and a small park. A couple of moms are pacing about with strollers, or watching their kids climb about the monkey bars, while chatting with each other. Derek and Will cross the park, into the sparse ring of school buildings, cleared for the summer.

In the shade of a giant oak tree, a few teenagers dressed in all black are smoking, then startle into standing when they catch sight of the two of them. Then, realizing that it is only Will and the guy from New York, they lean back against the tree with an air of forced nonchalance. Will has worked with one of the girls in her father’s boat during his second winter here. The girl flushes when he recognizes her.

“That smell will be hard to wash off,” Will feels obligated to tell her. “You can’t hide that from Mrs. Greenfield.”

Ashley, reddening still, gives a practiced eye roll and stomps down her joint. To her friend she mouths “Oh my god,” and then, loudly, as though afraid Will won’t be able to hear in his old age, she says, “C’mon, guys, let’s get out of here before Old Man Poindenture goes and _tells_ on us.”

“Did she just call you Old Man Poindenture?” Derek asks, once the teenagers are out of earshot. “Tell me that I wasn’t hearing things.”

“Yeah,” Will says, “it’s because I’m so ancient and grouchy all the time. I scare children, you know.”

There are the faintest hints of a giggle burrowed deep in Derek’s throat when he asks, “Really?”

“Ava told me Mrs. Gobson threatens her twins to get me to babysit every time they misbehave. The one time I did go, they were so scared of me they tucked themselves into bed right after dinner.”

“I see you’ve been keeping up your reputation after college.”

He looks like he wants to say more, but he cuts himself off. Almost hastily, Will points to the benches in the distance, and they head over to the art/English building to rest.

The benches are painted, one of them yellow and green with the words “Go LS!!!” under the picture of a swordfish with the lower torso of a bodybuilder. Derek lies down along the length of this bench, and Wills sits on the other end.

Companionable silence rolls out, languidly, between them. Derek takes out his notebook to jot down a couple of lines. Then he pulls his arms behind his back, pushing his chest forward in a stretch, before relaxing. And Will thinks, here he is, taking his college best friend around a high school that he never attended, in a town he had never thought he would end up in for the rest of his life.

After a while, Will notices that Derek has stopped writing. He is, in fact, covering his face with the notebook.

“You asleep?”

Derek makes a noise of dissent.

“Thinking?”

“Hm,” Derek agrees. He slides his notebook off and tucks it back into a pocket. “Not about the right things, though.”

“Like what?”

“Like—” Will can see clouds reflected in his eyes. Then they close, and Derek’s face is clear and unlined. “Just things.”

Will looks up at the sky and asks, “You like the tour so far? Was it useful?”

“Yeah. Definitely.”

“Alright. That’s good.” But he sounds hollow somehow, even to himself.

It is five in the afternoon. The heat of the day has largely subsided, and when a stray breeze catches the crevices between the buildings and tickles Will’s cheeks, he feels as though he can lay his head down too, take a nap. Even the seagulls’ occasional squawks, which he found so irritating not many summers ago, soothe him. He watches Derek’s bent legs instead, down to his loafers, which are speckled green near the bottom from their trek across the school fields. Then his feet shift; Will looks up and sees Derek’s Adam’s apple bob with a swallow.

“We’re getting farther away from the center of town, aren’t we?” Derek is pushing himself up.

“Yeah. Not much to see there. There’s the town office, the Otis Chapel, homes. We can— We can head over there, if you’re interested.”

“If you want.”

“But there’s another place I can show you.”

 

 

They leave the school, back to Derek’s car. On the road again, Will directs Derek past the harbor, past the last house built along Main Street and the paint-peeled sign that declares, “Langford, Maine, Inc. 1827.” They drive past the Millers’ produce storefront, the glimpses of wide blueberry fields peeking through thick fingers of yellow birches around the bend; past the leveled fields and named streets until it is Route 183 again, the no-man’s highway along the southern part of this county.

Far too early Will taps his knuckles against the window for Derek to take a right, off into unpaved road. Gravel kicks against the underbelly of the car. Derek asks, teasingly, if Will will be able to work his mechanic magic on the car if it breaks down, for it has never experienced wilderness like this. No guarantees, Will replies.

They reach the end and get out of the car.

“We’ll have to walk a bit,” Will warns.

“You taking me to the beach?” Derek asks. He lifts a branch for Will to duck through.

“Something like that.”

A few steps later, when Derek nearly falls trap to another mud puddle hidden beneath a bed of pine needles, he asks, exasperated, “Does everyone around here do this Indiana Jones shit every time they want a sandcastle?”

“Nah, just me.” The wind picks up, and Will raises his voice. “It’s—it’s not California, or anything like that. The water’s not nearly as blue, and you’d have to head back down to York County if you want sandy beaches. But it’s something to look at, up in these parts.”

When they break free of the woods, they are standing atop a stout cliff that reigns over a small cove. The cliff walls extend on two ends to hug a tumble of gravel shore. There sits a small house on the other side, long since emptied, left with only its façade and a chipped paint job that must have once been a pretty shade of red. Across from Will and Derek the sea breathes gentle waves against the shore. While they were traveling clouds had gathered thickly overhead, but the sun has dipped below the clouds, dying that band of sky above the horizon golden and orange and pale pink.

Will has rarely seen the place like this. Most of the time the coastline remains muffled by fog from sunup to sundown. When it rains, or when the first half-assed snowfalls come along in November, the shore is washed through with mud. The town has bestowed elaborate ghost stories to the abandoned house over the years, and the area is the site of more adolescent dares than youthful hideaways or family vacations. Will is sure the true name for the place is hidden somewhere among the town maps and archives, but he has only ever heard it referred to as Dead Man’s Point.

The lack of fog doesn’t clear away the thick balls of seaweed dotting the beach, or the ugly ditch near the outer edges of the cove that some kid has dug up for God knows what reasons. But right now, Dead Man’s Point is—if not beautiful, necessarily—pretty in a way that makes one’s head tilt. Will watches the scene through Derek’s eyes—watches his eyes widen and scan quickly across the beach and lower, watches Derek huff out a small laugh then lift his head up again.

“A million others like this all along New England,” Will says, on reflex.

Derek shakes his head. “I like it.” It sounds as though he is telling Will a secret.

They climb down a series of rocky steps, carved out by nature and hundreds of years of humans who had nothing better to do than look around tiny, ugly-ass beaches. Will reaches the bottom first and extends a hand up to Derek, which Derek accepts. The last couple of steps are the least steady of them all—the veterans would jump from a foot before—and Will feels Derek’s surprise in his grip when Derek loses his balance before Derek’s curses.

At once Will pulls Derek towards himself, his arm coming around Derek’s left shoulder to brace him. They step backward in tandem, once, twice. When they both steady, they are pressed wholly against each other save for their clasped hands trapped between their chests. They quickly let go.

“That was close,” Will exhales.

“Thanks.” Derek is rubbing the back of his neck sheepishly. “Would’ve cut this trip short if I fell and broke something.”

Perhaps high from being with Derek, or perhaps because he really has changed from the core, Will doesn’t splutter or blush, as he would have five or six years ago. Instead he tilts his head up and, with a grin, says, “It’s alright. I caught you, didn’t I?”

Derek appraises Will. “Yeah. Yeah, you did.”

Will feels brave all of a sudden, and he jogs over the pebbled beach. A few feet away from the edge of the water he takes off his shoes and socks and then pulls off his shirt by the collar. He steps into the water.

“Aren’t you coming?” Will shouts.

There is a pause. The winds around here are lighter than those on the cliff, but perhaps he missed Derek’s words. But then Derek laughs, and he walks closer, taking off those flip-flops and his own shirt as he does so. His glasses go last.

“If I’d known that coming here means I’d be freezing my balls off in the _Atlantic Ocean_ —”

“You’d what?” Will asks, watching him head deeper into the surf.

“Well, I’d—” Derek whips around with a shit-eating grin, “—go for the first offense,” he says, and dashes a scoop of freezing water right at Will.

 

 

By the time they’ve wrung most of the sea water out of the shorts, the sun has set. They spend twice as much time groping in the twilight back to Derek’s car—and that is not accounting for the time Derek tries to push Will into a mud puddle, and Will tries to both resist Derek and retaliate at the same time, resulting in both of them half-wrestling among the trees. (Derek gives first, citing the need to keep his car clean.)

They drive back to town to Earl’s Pizza. The joint smells as much like fish as the shipyard next door, but they have the pleasure to be served by the eponymous Earl—which, as Will explains, isn’t something you can get in most cities nowadays, Manhattan or not.

Halfway through watching Derek try to swallow his third slice of Earl’s Anchovy Delight, Will finally notices the clock behind the order window. He isn’t aware of how long he has been staring at the clock until Derek, midway through teasing Will again about his lack of wrestling prowess, cranes his head in the same direction.

“It’s nine-forty,” he tells Will, though of course Will already knows. “I’m full enough. You?”

“I—yeah. I’m ready.”

Derek nods and calls over one of Earl’s sons for a small box to-go. Will clears the table.

They don’t speak on the way back, though Will for the most part does not notice. He is simultaneously imagining everything that may have gone wrong back at his uncle’s house in the past seven hours and forcing himself to stop imagining everything that may have gone wrong back at his uncle’s house in the past seven hours. When Derek pulls into Uncle Quinton’s driveway and the house appears whole on the outside, he relaxes by a fraction—there goes a good fifth of his theories.

The living room lights are on.

“I’ll bring the pizza in,” Derek says. “I’m going to check for pebbles on my car for a bit—you go ahead.”

Will mumbles his thanks and pushes the car door open.

As soon as he enters the house, Capt. Ulysses Redden prods down the hall almost hurriedly, its nails tapping against the wooden plane. Will laughs, kneeling to allow the bulldog a couple of slow licks. “Good to see you too.”

“Billy? You back with your friend?” he hears Uncle Quinton call.

“I’m here,” Will says at once, rounding the corner to the living room.

Uncle Quinton is lifting himself upright from the purple arm chair, yawning severely and patting Ulysses when the dog finds his way to Quinton’s side. On the television, WMED is playing a PBS NewsHour segment, which is how Will knows his uncle has been asleep for at least half an hour. Uncle Quinton turns off the television with a small “tsk” and stands. The living room table looks freshly scrubbed, and in place of the metalsmithing tools is a wiry photo frame laced with glass beads.

“Derek’s checking up on his car,” Will tells his uncle.

“Hm,” his uncle says, heading for the bathroom. “Where’d you two go?”

“Just here and there.” And Will summarizes the trip for him. He listens as the toilet is flushed and the faucets turn on and off. Will was worrying for nothing after all.

“Sounds like a good time,” Uncle Quinton says as he left the bathroom. “Though take Derek to Cat Eye Island or somewhere else next time instead, won’t you? We shouldn’t show them New Yorkers anything but the best of these parts.”

“Maybe. He said he’s interested in coming on the boat anyway.”

Uncle Quinton grunts in something like approval and claps Will on the back as he makes labored steps down the hall, Ulysses following. “I’m hitting the hay now. I cut up a couple of apples after dinner—they’re in the kitchen if you want some. Tell Derek good night for me, won’t you?”

“Will do,” Will says. The door slips close.

He returns to the darkened living room and picks up his uncle’s new artwork, angling it against the light from the kitchen. Uncle Quinton has been reorganizing the basement, and Will thinks he recognizes the base of this new photo frame as one of those cobwebbing frames stacked up by the basement staircase last week. But now new wiring is welded over the circular base, woven crudely and carefully across each other, and strung through with glass beads. Diamond-shaped leaves occasionally dot the sides of the vines. At the center of the frame is a picture of Uncle Quinton’s late wife, Amelia, smiling into the camera, the edges of her eyes crinkling in crow’s feet.

The front door cracks open, and a few footsteps later Will hears Derek yelp.

“Oh my god—Jesus fucking Christ. You scared the shit out of me.”

“Sorry ’bout that.” Will laughs. “I forgot that people from away didn’t evolve to have night vision.”

“No we didn’t. Not even the New Yorkers.” Derek steps closer and rests his arm against the entrance of the living room. “I guess our iPhones did the evolving for the rest of us.”

Derek’s face is partially obscured by the shadows, but the grays of his irises seem to glow from lights spilt over down the hallway. Will’s last reply dies on his tongue, and all he can think is, _Oh. I remember this part_.

Then Derek leans back to glance down the hall. “Your uncle’s already asleep?”

“Yeah. There are some apples in the fridge he cut up, if you’re hungry. I know I cut our dinner short.”

“I’m good for now. Maybe later.” He returns his attention to Will. “You’ll be getting up in six hours, huh?”

“Yeah, I’ll be heading to bed soon. You?”

“Probably not for another couple of hours. I write best half-asleep anyway.” He straightens. “Thanks for today. It was fun.”

“Same.” Will clears his throat. “Good night.”

“Good night.” And Derek knocks against the wall twice before leaving the doorway. When his footsteps quiet, Will puts Aunt Amelia’s picture back to its place.

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I post updates at lyrithim.tumblr.com, if you want to visit me :-)


	3. Two-and-a-half Conversations

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Microfiches, bilge pumps, and one shower.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I also changed a bit of Uncle Quinton’s medical history in the first chapter so it more accurately portrays how lung cancer progresses. Also, warning, ish: They cook a live lobster in this one.
> 
> I enjoyed writing this chapter. Hope you enjoy reading it. :)

Every two weeks, Uncle Quinton and Frank Gobson journey to a lake east of Indian River, to fish and gossip like old men do. That Friday morning, then, Will was anticipating a sparse VHF environment, with perhaps a bit of shit-talking and in-jokes from the group of young men from town, with their usual morning radio host on leave.

As soon as Will flips on the radio, however, he finds Frank Gobson’s familiar accents chopping through the static. Mrs. Gobson, as it turns out, has decided to run for the mayor in the upcoming election, and she ordered her husband to do his part in appealing to the vital constituency of the Langford lobstermen. Irritated, Frank mingles the announcement with complaints about his wife’s overbearing attitude, drawing parallels with various candidates for the upcoming state and national elections, reserving a few of the more colorful analogies to the local flora and fauna.

“Though thanks to my wife Langford has been running on a surplus these last few quarters,” Frank says contemplatively near the end of the hour. “So I suppose we all ought to vote for her after all.”

A cut to his speakers should have followed. But it doesn’t. When Frank sounds dangerously close to speaking again, Will, feeling magnanimous that day, jumps in, “Sir, I think my uncle is waiting for you.”

Down the pier, Will hears scattered laughter. A couple of the lobstermen give mock boos before Frank too laughs and concedes his place. “But don’t supposed now your uncle won’t hear about your mouthing-off,” he adds, before signing off.

 

 

Later that day, Will realizes that Derek, the city boy that he is, likely hasn’t tasted a _real lobster_ yet.

Of course Derek must have had _lobsters_ before. Maybe he had even gone to one of those sea-to-table lobster shacks down in York or Knox County when he first made his trip up north, tried something that wasn’t lobster rolls. But what Will has right now in that slimy plastic bag, tied around his bike handle, is this morning’s best catch—something poetry-worthy, Will is certain, even for a kid from Manhattan.

Fridays do not have the same connotations they once did for Will when Saturday is also a work day. Still, he finds himself in an unusually good mood as he makes his way up his uncle’s driveway. Uncle Quinton’s wind chimes tinkle softly below the veranda, tickled by the warm breeze. White curtains roll past the opened dining room window. They were new. Uncle Quinton must have changed them before he left.

Will unties the plastic bag, the letters LLCP lightly printed over the front and back, and shoulders open the front door.

“Oy Nursey, are you there?” Will shouts. Capt. Ulysses prods down the hall, and Will goes to massage the bull dog’s scalp absentmindedly. “I’ve got something that you might—”

He stops.

 _Nursey_ , he thinks.

But there is no other sound in the house than Ulysses’ heavy pants, the baritone hum of the fridge, and the old grandfather clock’s steady tick-tocks.

“Good thing no one heard that, huh?” Will asks Capt. Ulysses. The bull dog ignores him in favor of the LLCP plastic bag, which he noses with interest.

Will ices the lobster and heads to the backyard, where the long string of laundry is hanging between an old stump and a young tree close to the house. As he plucks each garment from the line, Will considers his options. He can cook, but he knows his uncle will not return until seven and Derek is not at the house. He can also return to the boat and get an early head start on gear work, but the thought of heading back to the ocean so soon after declaring it a day is unappealing. There is no need for a trip to the grocer’s, and he has yet to receive his next assignment from the researcher in Machias.

Finally he remembers the call he and his uncle received from the Town of Langford earlier that week about property taxes. He will head over after all to clarify a couple of things with Mrs. Stewart—maybe even congratulate Mrs. Gobson on her candidacy.

The Langford town office was until twelve years ago the Langford post office. Operating costs for a declining population made the post office’s existence unprofitable, so it was decided that Langford mail would be delivered to the town of Addison seven miles away. Will parks his uncle’s pickup by the gray-blue stump that used to hold up a USPS mailbox and greets Mrs. Stewart, the receptionist, who directs him to the appropriate office with the appropriate forms two doors down. He signs the papers off with the same scraggly, awkward signature he has meant to change for five years now, but always forgets until after he crosses the _t_ and dots the three _i_ ’s. When he crosses the hall to return the form to Mrs. Stewart, he hears a familiar voice by Archives:

“...yes, Ammi. Two months. Dad knows—I talked to him yesterday. I—” There is a sigh. “I took the Berkeley job. You know I can’t…”

Will knocks. He hears a quick “Just—I’ve got to go—I’m sorry” from the other side before opening the door. Derek is leaning against the far wall, massaging his left temple, phone still in hand.

While in Samwell, Derek never shied away from the topic of his parents. Will knows from Family Weekends that Derek had his father’s easy-going manners and—in his quieter moments—his mother’s steely eyes. Were he ever asked, Will thinks Derek himself would insist that he received nothing but total and undivided love from his parents.

In one of those swampy October Kegster morning-afters, where shared hangovers lent way to something like fireside tales in their double room at the Haus, Derek told the story of his own father teaching him to dance. The man never got to be terribly successful—Derek’s lack of talent with rhythmic movement on dry ground had been apparent even at age eight. Derek said that he had felt crushed, then, and that fit with what Will knew of him—that Derek would have been the type of kid to be hard on himself no matter what the subject. But Derek remembered what his father said, that dancing was whatever movement freed up the soul, and eventually Derek found that in skating, then in hockey.

But some things slip. When Derek finished the tale, Will asked what his mother thought of Derek switching out tripping on land for tripping on ice. It was meant as a joke. But Derek just laughed and said, “She wanted me to study more, probably,” and changed the subject.

Will heard nothing he could not have inferred on his own, from what he knew about Derek’s family while in Samwell. But it still surprises him, standing on the other side of the door to the Archives department: with all the things that have changed about Derek, this remains the same.

“Hey,” Will says. Derek glances up. “Thought I saw you earlier.”

“Small world.” Derek grins. “You’re done for the day?”

“More or less. You’re,” Will hesitates, having only an extremely abstract idea of the going-ons of the Archives department, “looking through—the archives?”

“Newspapers. Well—microfilms, from before 1985,” he says, holding up a thick roll of film. “Seen these before?”

“No,” Will admits, embarrassed.

“Nah, don’t worry,” Derek says quickly, as though to reassure him. “It’s more something you’d know if you sat around in libraries for three and a half years.”

And now the both of them seem embarrassed, though Will can’t fathom why.

“Here,” Derek says, “let me, uh, show you. Turn off the lights?”

Will does. He goes to lean against the table by Derek’s side. In front of them sits a dust-covered machine with a projector neck. Derek unfurls an arm’s length of glossy black film, which he wraps around three rollers and the flat platform in a series of complicated and seemingly arbitrary turns. He flicks a switch. The old machine comes to life. The platform is lit from beneath, and the gears behind the rollers spins, forcing the film over the flat surface with a whisper of friction, rattling terribly all the while. Surprised, Will flinches back.

Derek catches this movement and laughs. Back in Samwell, Will took a long time to learn that Derek laughed at situations, not people. That he found humor in in surprise and oddness that naturally occurred among the world’s creations—that the laugh was one of genuine delight, and not malice. Now Will looks away sheepishly again, and the next thing he feels is Derek’s warm arm around his shoulders.

“It’s a microfilm reader, Poindexter,” Derek tells him.

“I see.”

“It’s friendly,” Derek adds, prodding it with one finger. “Won’t bite.”

“Well,” Will says, “I know that _now_.”

The gears stop. A blurry rectangle is projected against the wall before them, the masthead reading _The Langfordian Times_. Then, below: _January 1, 1962_. The top half of the page features an article about progress on repairs for the old bridge that connects Langford to Jonesport on the northeast.

“Newspapers,” Will repeats. Even newspapers that were discontinued and merged into the _Swafford Bay Weekly_ long before Will ever arrived to this town.

He is turning to Derek with a smile when Derek abruptly pulls back his arm and lopes to the other side of the room, among the cabinets, his fingers trailing along the labels next to each handle.

When Derek doesn’t say anything for a while, Will asks, impressed, “You’ve been going through all these on your spare time?” He tentatively presses the ZOOM IN button, then the SCROLL RIGHT button, watching the screen move accordingly.

"Hopping around the years, mostly,” Derek says. “It’s some old-fashion research.”

“You do this for every little village you visit?”

“I like to get a feel for the history of the place, if I’m going to write about it.” There are sounds of drawers pulled open, then slid back. “There was this place in Paraguay I visited in March—” Derek stops himself.

“Paraguay?” Will asks. He has abandoned his attention from the microfilm reader, which is showing a close-up of then-mayor Brian Hartley’s left nostril.

“I stayed there for a bit after Yale,” Derek says. He all but slams the next drawer. “Among other places. It’s no big.”

“Alright,” Will says, perplexed. “Do you need a hand or something?”

“No.” Derek has moved on to the shelves of physical newspapers sheathed in plastic covers.

“Alright.”

When Derek does not offer any explanation, Will sits on the stool in front of the microfilm reader. Scratching the back of his head, he says, “You know, even though it’s pretty late, there’s still a couple hours of sunlight. If you want, after this I can drive you down the coast—”

“I can’t,” Derek cuts in. “Owen and the rest of the guys invited me to watch a game with them at a bar in Jonesport. Don’t think I’ll have the time. I’m sorry.”

The room is still dark. In the long, silent seconds that follow, Will wonders why he feels so winded. Derek could not have more effectively shut him up than if he had told Will to. Derek only stated a simple fact: he is leaving the town with Owen—one of the younger lobstermen—and his friends. He has prior obligations. This is a schedule conflict. Blameless on both sides.

Why, then, did Derek sound almost furious? Why, then, did it feel as though Derek was turning him down on a date? And here the horror seeps in— _was_ he asking Derek out for a date? Has Will been flirting with Derek after all? If he searches his conscience, he knows he will find it not totally untrue, that he has been hovering along Purgatory, holding gazes for a few seconds too long, handing invitations that can be interpreted as something or nothing at all. At best it is cowardly, and at worst it is an undesired come-on from someone with whom Derek is sharing a roof. Of course Derek would have no time for that kind of bullshit.

It is hard to face Derek now. When words return to his tongue, Will says, “No, I should’ve asked. I’m sorry.” But that is wrong, too. “I should’ve known—” But didn’t he? “It’s that—I could’ve been a better host.”

Seconds pass. Then Derek says, seemingly from miles away, “I didn’t want to take up too much of you and your uncle’s time. You’re working full-time on the sea, and he’s still recovering from chemo.”

Will shouldn’t stay longer, lest Derek thinks Will is waiting for an apology. They are both men in their mid-twenties. Will is going to wrest himself from whatever silliness he was headed moments ago and be an adult about this.

“I’ve been to the bar Owen’s talking about,” Will says. “It’s a nice place, for somewhere with a bunch of fake plastic leprechauns lining up the window. The beer isn’t half-bad either.”

Derek, who has been gripping two parallel sides of a cardboard box, looks up as though from a stupor. He stands fully. “Before, that wasn’t—”

“Everything alright in here?”

Mrs. Stewart has peeked her head in, and she is staring through her owlish glasses at Derek, who bears the brunt of the escaped hallway light. “I never quite learned how to work the machines myself,” she adds, conspiratorially. “They’re quite complicated things.”

“It’s all been fine,” Derek says.

“I’ll be heading out now,” Will takes this moment to tell Derek. He grabs the pages he had stapled together earlier. “I’ve just been here to ask about last year’s property taxes.”

“Oh but of course,” Mrs. Stewart says quizzically.

“I know,” Derek says at the same time, which catches Will again off-balance. “I—” Derek is gripping the sides of the cardboard box. “I’ll be seeing you.”

 

 

When Will gets home, Uncle Quinton is back and setting up the kitchen. His first words to Will are “Did one of our neighbors kick the bucket while I was out or did Jimmy Taylor throw you into the bay again?”

Will feels his face struggling to form a scowl and a smile at the same time. He gives up and laughs.

“Jimmy’s parents haven’t come to Langford for the summer since before I went to middle school,” he informs his uncle.

“So someone died. Well, I hope it was Graham. His daughter would be much better managing the general store than he ever could.”

“Uncle Quinton,” Will says, trying to hold back another laugh.

“It’s the truth.” He shrugs. Then he asks, “So what was it?”

The skin around Will’s collar prickles uncomfortably. “It’s been a long day, that’s all.”

If his uncle presses anymore, Will would have to lie to him. But Uncle Quinton only says, “So I see you’ve brought a lobster home,” and lifts the sluggishly peddling lobster by the carapace. “Steam it?”

When Will replies in the affirmative, Uncle Quinton dumps the pot full of vegetables into his largest pan, fills the pot with an inch of water, and gestures for Will to place the lobster in the pot instead. Will does, and his uncle switches on the stove. Then his uncle returns to the smaller pan, on which a wide-eyed bass has been frying. He bats away Will’s hands when he tries to take over.

They talk about Quinton’s fishing trip with Frank Gobson. The two old men had a decent haul that morning—at another friend’s advice, they baited their hooks with mussels instead of rubber minnows and moved a mile up the shore. The result was a modest improvement in on-hook rate, and the two men were quite impressed. They had not previously thought much of this friend’s intelligence, this friend having moved to Florida just a few years past to marry a woman a decade his senior, but they supposed this was grounds for reevaluation.

Will remains quite entertained throughout the story. More than that, story time with his uncle means that he does not have to speak. Or so he thinks.

“You know, Billy,” Uncle Quinton begins, “I’m glad you finally have a friend over.”

But Will is not ready to talk about Derek yet, if only because he still doesn’t know how to properly frame his current fuckup in a context he himself is able to process. So he grunts in reply.

“It’s about time, you know,” Uncle Quinton says. “Young men like you ought to talk to other young men your own age.”

“I talk to Chowder every couple of weeks.” Will is still figuring out how he will break the news of Derek’s stay here to him. He was planning on asking Derek about it—at some point. “And remember Sebastian?”

“Sure I do.” Uncle Quinton nudges the frying fish to a side, to make way for more oil. “High school friend.”

“Well there you go.”

“But none of them from Langford either,” Uncle Quinton notes, placid.

Will, clearing the kitchen table, replies, “No.”

There is nothing wrong with the other twenty-somethings in Langford. When Will first moved here, he fully expected to blend in with the rest of the guys—he had gotten to know a couple of them, after all, when he was in high school and just helping his uncle out on the boat. They invited him to drinks, and for a couple weeks he did go. Then he stopped. He told them that he had to take care of his uncle, and he told himself his family needed the money he would drink away. But it was more than that.

He saw a ridge between them, and they did too. They think it’s snobbery on his part for having gone to a liberal arts college for three years, but the truth is that he feels the ridge yawn, and widen, whenever they teased and ribbed each other about the girls in town, out of town, or on screens. They turned to him then, and he felt he did not have the energy to lie for recognition from his peers, like he did in high school. And leaving for Massachusetts was no longer an option.

What he cannot understand, he thinks, is how Derek so easily slipped into Owen’s crowd, who compose such a group so different from Samwell Men’s Hockey. Maybe it is Will’s own lack of understanding of Derek himself. After all, Derek has navigated many more spheres in his life than just the context Will knew him in. Samwell has ever only been one facet of Derek’s life.

Before Uncle Quinton can comment further, Will moves to wash the rag he used to wipe the table, and he says, “Derek is going out with Owen and the others to the Irish Charm for the night.”

“The pub in Jonesport?” Uncle Quinton flips the fish. “If your granddaddy had lived to see that place, he’d probably have a stroke.”

“It’s not that bad.”

“I ain’t making any personal judgments on it myself,” his uncle tells him. Which is a lie, and they both know it. “You’re not going with them?”

“I’ve got work to do,” Will says, and lets his uncle infer the rest.

 

 

The next day, when Will finishes hauling traps and returns to the docks, he glances at his watch to find that the hour hand has yet moved past two. Another early day, he thinks, though he should have known from the position of the sun, which has yet yellowed. Five years in, Will is still unsure whether he works faster when he is in a good mood or if the opposite is true.

From the moment he awoke that day—and maybe even before—Will’s mind has been caught in the tangle that is Derek and Derek yesterday at the town office. No matter what happened between them on that last day of their junior year in Samwell, the moment has passed. Derek has long moved on, and Will should have the courtesy at least to do the same.

The dinghy below his feet holds the day’s catch. Since Monday, the lobsters have dwindled. It is foolish for him to speculate on the rest of the season based on one week, especially when wads of streamers from the Memorial Day parade are still tangled in the lawns of the houses downtown. But by the end of the day, he seems to be hauling nothing but seaweed and saltwater.

It is the first Saturday of the month—maintenance day—and Will drove his uncle’s pickup truck to the harbor for this occasion. After a quick scrubbing and hosing down the deck, he tows the _Yellow Irish Rose_ onto dry land. He starts by inventorying any damages to the boat over the past month, beginning first with the hull’s gel coat.

By two-thirty the sun is at its peak, and Will strips off his shirt, which is now as soaked as it would’ve been if he’d ducked overboard. While he waits for the new spots of the gel coat to cure, he lifts the boat hatch to inspect the bilge pump once again. A thin sheen of water covers the very bottom of the boat’s interior, but otherwise the bilge itself is as free of muck and debris as it could be, the boat being out at sea six days out of the week.

Quick flips of the helm switch find the pump’s motor running merrily, but Will remains unconvinced that the putter-squelch sound he heard from the deck was, as Mr. Wilson suggested at the docks yesterday, a matter of chipped-off paint caught in the pipes. If the pump fails in the middle of a trip out, Will can be forced to swim a couple of miles back to shore. And anyway, his uncle is at the hospital for a checkup, and there is no reason for him to head back home so early.

He has just set his toolbox on the deck when he hears three sharp raps against the hull. Will stands and finds Derek standing on the beach below.

“Poindexter,” he says.

“Hey.” Will tries for a smile. “Woke up just now?”

“Nah,” Derek says, facing the sea. “Woke up at seven, if you can believe that. Not even a little hungover. Then again, I didn’t really drink that much yesterday.”

Derek’s hangovers after Haus parties were legendary among the team. Will thinks this is the first time Derek has referenced Samwell since their lunch together on Monday.

“The booze was that bad?”

Derek shrugs. “I haven’t really drunk since grad school.” He looks up at Will again. “Are you bringing her in for repair?”

“Just maintenance. I’m checking out a pump now.”

“Mind if I watch?”

“No,” Will says. He clears his throat. “Not if you mind the smell, that is.”

He offers Derek a grape soda from the pickup. Derek accepts and sips at the soda as Will untangles wires around the pump. There is no sign that Derek drank the day before. His eyes are clear behind those square glasses. He balances himself easily on the rail, one leg swinging. Derek is wearing a dark blouse today, prints of orange flowers stretched along his lower torso, buttons loose down to the sternum. It is the sort of clothing he never wore back in Samwell, but it looks good on him.

Occasionally Will asks for tools from the box—wire cutters, pliers—and Derek would hand them over, alongside a couple of questions. They aren’t incredibly technical ones, the questions. But then Will asks, mindlessly, for the crimpers, and he finds himself looking at the correct tool in his hand a second later.

“I met a guy who captains a fishing boat in Paranaguá—in the more southern part of Brazil,” Derek says. It is hard to tell against the sun, but Will thinks Derek is blushing. “ _Crimpagem_ , crimping—I had, like, an education on these things.”

“Of course,” Will replies easily. “And by ‘meeting’ this captain and getting ‘an education,’ you mean—?”

“No,” Derek says quickly. “Raul has a wife and three kids, the kind of fiercely monogamous guy that—I would never— _God_ no.”

“Relax. I’m just messing with you,” Will laughs, pinning together two exposed wires. The motor spins weakly, but the pump does not turn. The float switch was broken, then. “But Brazil? And you said Paraguay yesterday? Sounds like you’ve been all over South America.”

“Not really. Mostly Paraná and a few places near the Misiones province in Argentina.”

“What, you spent all of this year down in another continent— You were trying to get over a girl or something?”

“Partly to visit a friend from Andover,” Derek says. “But yeah, actually.”

The tip of Will’s screwdriver skitters off the side of the pump’s plastic covering. Holding the shaft more carefully now, Will turns loose the hinges of the switch. He asks, “From Yale?”

Derek sets the soda down, the glass bottle balancing precariously against the rail. Against the sunlight, the cheap purple food dye glitters darkly, like amethyst.

“She was doing Yale Law, gunning to be a human rights lawyer. We met at the opening graduate student mixer a few weeks after the semester began. We were arguing over Robert Penn Warren, I think, and whether he deserved that second poetry Pulitzer. It took me forever to realize that she wasn’t studying literature at all.” Will carefully unfurls a segment of electric tape, listening. “Valerie—she had gotten into Yale Law the year after I did, but we were the same age, and we would have left New Haven the same year too— We _did_ , technically,” Derek corrects himself.

“What happened to you then?”

“We got jobs at different places,” Derek says. “Happens with half of the couples I saw. Life, or something.” He shrugs, still staring at a point over Will’s head in the horizon. “I guess we were more different from what either of us thought the other to be. But I was a heartbroken dumbass, so I did what other heartbroken dumbass Americans with a trust fund did—fucked off to a foreign country and tried to ‘find myself.’”

He says the last bit half-turned to Will, and Will says, obligingly, “ ‘Dumbass’ isn’t wrong,” and a corner of Derek’s lips turns up.

Will finishes rejoining the wires on the pump, and Derek finishes his soda. They move off the boat to Uncle Quinton’s pickup—the gel needs a bit more time before Will can wax over it. But there also isn’t a lot of space at the back. With the clutter of lobster cages and boat parts piled up in the trunk, Will and Derek are pretty much pressed up side-by-side over the edge of the truck. Will can feel the heat from Derek’s side.

He hands a nectarine over to Derek and starts on one himself. The nectarines are a gift from Mrs. Gobson, handed over by Ava while Will weighed the day’s catch at the co-op station. It is difficult to bite into the fruit without making a mess of himself, but he manages. Done, he skips the pit across the ocean (it sinks after one skip) and washes his hands again, only to turn back and see Derek carefully licking off the juice of the fruit from his glistening fingers.

But Derek is focused on a cluster of boats approaching the harbor. Will thinks he spots Owen’s boat among them. Calming himself, Will climbs on the back again, leaning against the side with one of his knee up between him and Derek, to put as much artificial distance between them as possible.

“You then?” Derek suddenly asks.

“Me?”

“No one in this town knows?”

The jolt Will felt earlier, at hearing the name of Derek’s ex, bifurcates then spiders down his skin, almost dancingly.

“No one in this town knows I’m gay,” Will repeats. He says the words Derek didn’t just to prove that he _can_ , if he chooses to. “No one in my family, aside from my sister.”

And no one else in the world—that goes unspoken. It isn’t true though, but of course Chowder didn’t tell Derek. Will came out to Chowder a few weeks before the end of their junior year, and he supposes there is always a chance that Bitty might have guessed. Will was going to tell Derek too, but then his mother called to tell him about Uncle Quinton coughing up blood over Easter.

But no one else on the team, and he hadn’t been exactly out to anyone else in Samwell except the guys he slept with. So effectively no one else in the world. Will waits for Derek’s next words, to ask _why_? What decade is it now? And doesn’t Will understand the point at which remaining in the closet becomes a selfish act?

But Derek just asks, “You haven’t been with anyone these past five years then?”

“I go down to Portland every month. Swing by a couple bars there,” Will says, standing and stepping out of the shadow. He turns away from Derek—and the sun—and pulls his left arm over his right, stretching a little. “I also know a guy from my hometown; we went to high school together.” He pulls his other arm over his head, leaning to the left now. “There are also more tourists up in Machias. And more of the young academic types there. The liberal arts grad students tend to be more liberal-minded.”

Immediately realizing what he said, Will straightens, hoping to pass off the flush down his chest as a result of sunburn. But Derek is facing the sea now, and wouldn’t have seen either way.

“Guess Old Man Poindenture does well for himself then,” Derek says.

They don’t talk much after that. Soon later, Derek finishes the grape soda and takes his leave. Will offers to drive him back, not expecting him to take up the offer. Derek does refuse, explaining that he is planning on driving down Route 183 again, to catch some inspiration from the coastline.

 

 

Will repeats the same thirty-minute drive he made that morning to the Sutton Cancer Institute. It is late enough when Will arrives that he does not bother Mary, the oncology nurse, or the receptionist on shift for details. Instead, he listens carefully to his uncle on the way back to Langford. Unlike Frank, Uncle Quinton has not grown more loquacious with age, but the fact that he can grunt out a few complaints about overattentive nurses and terrible vending machine choices soothe Will’s worries by a mile. As Dr. Ruiz explained over the phone, this appointment was simply a follow-up to the latest scan results, which had shown that the cancer displayed no signs of progression.

Even so the journey clearly exhausts Uncle Quinton, as it has every time. When they return home, Uncle Quinton gives Capt. Ulysses two quick scratches on the head before bidding Will good night. In the meantime, Derek’s car remains absent from the driveway. Will, who was half expecting Derek to confront him at the lobby, his belongings packed, finds Derek’s room empty of the person but still scattered with his belongings. So Will fixes himself dinner—fettuccine alfredo with yesterday’s lobster stirred in—and leaves a sticky note and half the pan for Derek. Back in his room, Will pulls out his laptop.

He has been doing some coding work of the least glamourous variety—data cleaning—for a professor and his research assistant in UMaine Machias for a few years now. The current project consists of pulling text from old PDFs on the website of the state’s Marine Resources department, but the records are hopelessly corrupt and inconsistent in organization. It is a more sophisticated problem than either Will or the tenured, fancifully ambitious ecology professor previously realized. Coupled with the day’s events, Will is left frustrated all the way until midnight, at which time he decides to call it a night and take a shower. Derek has yet to return.

Uncle Quinton’s boiler is just unreliable enough that shifts in shower temperature keep Will alert and clear-minded. Will doesn’t think a single minute has passed in the past eight hours where he hasn’t thought about Derek. When the water turns cool for the second time, he decides that it must be sexual frustration. It hasn’t been that long since he left the county, but his uncle also hasn’t been this well—relatively—in a long time. And then there is the summer heat. This whole situation reminds him of the same dumb crush he had on Derek the summer after his sophomore year. The daydreams and fantasies. Every day agony for the week where he and Chowder would drive up to Will’s hometown. Nineteen, Will thinks, pressing his forehead against the tiles. It seems so young to him already.

Sexual frustration, and traces of teenage infatuation, Will thinks, toweling himself dry. But Will isn’t nineteen anymore. With that in mind, he wraps a towel around his waist and steps out the shower.

Derek stands in front of him, having clearly just returned: his collar is askew, and there is a wild, free look to his hair, and his eyes. His cheeks are faintly flushed. His hand grips firmly around the doorknob to his room.

After three full seconds have passed, Will asks, “You were out?”

“Just down south for a couple of hours,” Derek replies. Will can still feel the steam at his back. “Went to another bar. Chatted with the bartend, tried to—You’re up late,” he says, as though Will is the one out driving until one in the morning.

“That’s, I— I do some data work on the side for a professor from around here,” Will tells him, running his fingers through the wet strands of his hair. “I was going to meet up with her grad student tomorrow, but the work was…” he trails off.

A bead of water runs along the curve of Will’s jaw, tickling his neck and sliding past his collarbone. Will watches as Derek’s eyes follow it down the plane of Will’s chest and his navel, into the knot of the towel slung low around his hips. Then Derek drags his gaze back to Will’s face and, without breaking eye contact, slowly wets his lips. There is no hiding Will’s flush now.

“A grad student, huh?” Derek teases, with almost a laziness to his voice. He tilts his head to one side. “Liberal arts?”

Will cannot speak. The air around them grows heavy from steam.

Derek opens his door. Finally, he asks, “You want to come in for a bit?”

“Yeah,” Will is left to say. “I’d like that.”

 


End file.
